My name is Helen Jones and I’m a doctor employed by the British Antarctic Survey. For the next nine months I’ll be working on board the James Clark Ross as she performs scientific research in the Southern Ocean and supplies the British research bases of Antarctica.
I’ve started this blog in the hopes of entertaining and giving people a chance to see some pretty pictures. I might even throw some science in occasionally!

Tuesday, 25 October 2016

Apparently seals fart. A lot.

A holiday feeling has prevailed today aboard the good ship
James Clark Ross. The conditions have been so choppy and the weather so bad
that the order came from above to give the science stations a miss. Trying to
winch rather heavy bottles and bits of gear into the ocean is fairly tricky
even when the ocean isn’t doing its best to clamber inside the ship because it
hears that the decor is just so fabulous!

Scientists have therefore been wandering about with a
strangely lost look all day. Their day usually starts at 4am with the first set
of data collection, so I think the majority of them were thrown by the
unaccustomed amounts of sleep! This was not my problem. I played yet another
fun round of “Guess that Noise and Name that Annoying Rattle!” and spent the
night wrapping clothing around everything metallic in my cabin. Why do I own so
many metal things? Thus when 7.00 rolled around, I grunted obscenities at my
phone and snivelled into my pillow.

But, today I’ve heard a confirmation of some rather exciting
gossip. Our itinerary has always said that we will make port at the Falklands
and then re-supply Signy and Rothera. The Shackleton has the job of
re-supplying Halley, King Edward Point (that’s South Georgia) and Bird Island.
But apparently we’ve made such good progress on our jaunt south that we have an
extra day before we need to get into the Falklands. So we may be going to South
Georgia after all! Even better, we may be getting off the ship and going for a
look around!

I am so excited. I didn’t mention this rumour when I first
heard it because frankly this ship is a hotbed of rumours and misinformation. I
thought it was immeasurably better to pretend to myself that really I didn’t
care if we got to go ashore at South Georgia. I was totally indifferent to the
thought...Hah! This is immense!

Do you know what’s at South Georgia? That’s right. Penguins,
absolute boatloads of penguins. Oh, and seals and sea birds and every other
smelly farting thing that you can think of!I can’t wait. The bit that I’m most hopeful of seeing is Ernest
Shackleton’s grave. For those who don’t know, Shackleton was part of the
“heroic age” of exploration. Men like Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton went south
to Antarctica to explore the continent ostensibly in the name of science and possibly
in a spirit of jingoism. Whatever their motivations, what seems certain is that once they
had been South, they were powerless to resist going back.

The story of Shackleton’s most famous venture, the Imperial
Trans-Antarctic Expedition is fairly well known. Mere days before the outbreak
of World War I, Shackleton’s team received a fairly laconic telegram from the
Admiralty telling them to “proceed” and so they set sail in the Endurance. Whilst
navigating the Weddell Sea, the ship became stuck in pack ice, which eventually
crushed her leaving the men of the expedition no choice but to decamp to the
ice floes. When the ice began to break up, Shackleton ordered his men into the
three life boats and they made their way to Elephant Island- an inhospitable
place that they only reached after 5 exhausting days at sea.

Elephant Island wasn’t on the main shipping routes, so
Shackleton picked a group of men to make the further journey to South Georgia
where a whaling station was known to exist. This nautical jaunt, a mere
720miles in open life boats with a sextant as the only navigational aid, was
performed and his men arrived on South Georgia.

Sadly, the poor beggars were on the wrong side
of the island, so they had to cross 32miles of mountainous terrain with 50ft of
rope and a carpenter’s adze between them. Apparently they drove screws into
their boots so that they would work as climbing boots.

They made it across and Shackleton’s men back on Elephant
Island were rescued four months later by
a Chilean captain, Louis Pardo and a British whaling vessel. No man was lost.
Not a man died. Isn’t that extraordinary? So, in the words of another famous
explorer, Apsley Cherry-Garrard,

“For a joint scientific and geographical piece of
organisation, give me Scott...for a dash to the Pole and nothing else give me
Amundsen and if I am in a devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me
Shackleton every time.”

Shackleton died of a heart attack in 1921 in South Georgia,
whilst trying to launch another Antarctic expedition. His wife requested that
he be buried there. To be able to see his grave and pour a tot of
whiskey for the man...well that would be a fine thing.

2 comments:

Lovely blog! Good luck and I hope you make it there. I've had a wee dram on that spot and it was most moving (not to mention accompanied by incredible scenery). Looking forward to reading about the rest of your adventures!